


don't want nothing; can't use nothing

by JennaCupcakes



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, First Kiss, Kissing, M/M, Memory Loss, but memory loss of the slow and gradual kind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:02:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25091302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JennaCupcakes/pseuds/JennaCupcakes
Summary: James Fitzjames is a man who has made a life telling stories. Now, he finds he cannot remember his lines.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 30
Kudos: 56





	don't want nothing; can't use nothing

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when I rediscover [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjWmV3EgocI) and continue to have intense feelings about James Fitzjames. To all Germans reading this: Only God can judge me. 
> 
> Title taken from Colter Wall’s [Nothin'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jms03IMUjSs), which is apparently a Townes Van Zandt cover. Who knew?

James Fitzjames is a man who has made a life telling stories. They’re what make him a man instead of a construct, poorly plastered together—they’re the flesh on his bones, the brick and mortar of his successes. He venerates the art of holding an audience captive, of allowing them to be, for just a moment, the man he conjures up—a hero, an explorer, James Fitzjames. Whoever that may be.

James does not remember the beginning to this story.

It simply begins, one day, with him at the table in the Great Cabin on _Erebus_ , two winters locked in the ice now. It begins with Bridgens, asking if he needs anything set out. James frowns.

“For the meeting, sir.”

The meeting. There might be one, today, or there might not. James realises with a start he has no way of telling. He went over to _Terror_ yesterday, stayed late, and he and Crozier might have agreed to such a thing, to keep the wardroom—what’s left of it—apprised of their decisions. The days bleed into each other for James. But he knows it is more than that.

Bridgens is doing a poor job of disguising his concern. James wishes he would put down the tray of tea or move out of the doorway or do bloody anything except stare at James like that. It makes James feel like his fate is a foregone conclusion.

“It must’ve slipped your mind, sir. It’s no wonder, with how busy you are.”

It makes James want to laugh. Busy. They keep busy, yes, but there’s nothing to do for them out here. There are too many hours in the day, and only so many times one can go through the same motions before realising it’s all futile. But he doesn’t laugh. Instead, he smiles.

James smiles—an easy, well-practised gesture that has masked so many lies with varying degrees of success over the years. It’s so familiar that it often succeeds in convincing himself.

“Of course not.”

The spot in his recollection where the memory should be feels like the hollow of a lost tooth. James stumbles over it, but he has a lifetime of experience of disguising the holes in his stories. The location of his birth, the length of his duty as a volunteer of first class. The precise whereabouts of Sir John Barrow’s son on a particularly humid Singapore afternoon. He can right his posture and sit down at the table in the great cabin like he cannot feel himself coming apart at the edges of his own consciousness.

* * *

The meeting drags on interminably. James finds he cannot focus. He knows he should try, for the good of his men, for the good of all of them. Still, the words remain mysteries to him, even as he watches Edward Little underline them with gestures as he speaks; even as he watches George Hodgson make a careful point with fearful eyes. Francis keeps looking over at him, as though James’s silence is concerning—he knows it is but cannot do anything about it. James avoids his eyes.

James is relieved when the meeting ends, and men begin to file out of the room. He remains seated at the table for a moment longer, feeling the exhaustion in his bones like an oppressive weight strapped to his back. Then he shakes it off and rises.

To his surprise, Francis is still there.

Francis stands like he is expecting something. He holds his arms at his sides, seemingly too aware of them, and trying not to be. His eyes—blue, very blue, pale like sunlight through a glacier—are moving left to right, left to right, and James realises he is waiting for a sign.

James desperately tries to think what kind.

“Well. I’ll be off, then.”

When Francis says it, his face snaps shut like a book and James stumbles backward—he has missed something; and he knows immediately that it is not because he hasn’t read the clues correctly. It is because he can’t remember the blasted clues.

“Francis, wait.”

He moves to grab Francis’s arm; a gesture Francis evades with the ease of the healthier man. He is irritated with James now: their accord is still a delicate thing, one that has not built up enough credit to be very forgiving. James wonders how he might broach the subject delicately.

“Please...” he says, then tries to think what sort of plea he might let follow—anything he might say betrays more than he is willing to show. “I didn’t mean—"

Perhaps it is the lost look on his face that convinces Francis. Perhaps it is nothing but a stroke of good luck. 

“James,” Francis says, now clasping his hands behind his back as though he is hoping to pass muster. “If you regret what has passed between us—should you not wish to—" His shoulders sag. “I apologise for taking such liberties.”

Can Mnemosyne be so cruel? James looks at Francis once more; takes stock of his stiff posture and the words he cannot say. He feels the tooth-gap in his memory, and desperately tries to grasp at the shape of it.

He takes a step forward, towards Francis, and listens for an echo—any echo—in his mind that tells him he has done this before. Nothing. The wool of Francis’s coat is freshly fallen snow on his mind: He is certain he has not walked this way before.

His recollection is one thing. The snowmelt of relief on Francis’s face another. James feels his way through the white space; a blind man navigating by touch. He draws Francis close. That is accepted.

James begins to understand Newton's law of attraction—this close, the next step becomes a foregone conclusion and he pulls Francis into an embrace. It should be awkward, if the motion were unfamiliar on both sides, but Francis moves like someone who has done this before, fitting his head under James is chin. He exhales a shuddering breath. James finds he has forgotten to breathe altogether. Surely his own desires should be as instructive as a compass-needle in mapping a way for him—if he has wanted something in the past, he should want it now also. Then he remembers where they are, and nearly laughs. Even compasses can lose their way. He doesn’t know what he wants; or rather he does, but his first and foremost wish is to remember. To not do Francis the disservice of forgetting him. That stings worst of all.

There is still hesitancy in the way Francis holds himself. James ponders the next step. This here is more treacherous than navigating the ice. Luckily, James has a lifetime of experience navigating even the most precarious social situations.

“May I kiss you, Francis?”

There. If they have not done this before, he is asking Francis for permission. If they have, Francis may read his words as flirtatious rather than insecure. James can’t decipher the huff Francis gives as one or the other, but the answer he speaks is unambiguous. “You bloody better, Fitzjames.”

Delicately, stepping into the unmarred snow of this moment, James withdraws from their embrace enough to cup Francis’s face between his hands. He catalogues Francis’s face and hopes he can commit it to memory this time. How dare he forget something so beautiful.

Francis is impatient; James can see it in his eyes. He licks his lips and shifts his stance, uncomfortable under scrutiny. He has no reason to be. James finds him marvellous and tells him so.

“I’m inclined to believe you knocked your head slipping on the ice,” Francis grumbles. Rather than attempt to convince him with words, James closes the distance between them and presses his lips to Francis's.

This, too, does not result in a dramatic rush of suddenly recalled memories. The sensation of Francis’s mouth against his own is delicate, pleasant, and entirely unknown to him. James contents himself with learning the shape of Francis’s lips first, by small close-mouthed kisses pressed along the line of them. Francis’s eyes have fallen closed, as though he has given himself over wholly to James, and James wonders if he kissed Francis like this the first time. Is Francis detecting a pattern while James is lost at sea? He hopes to God he savoured their first kiss; hopes he wasn’t greedy or inattentive in taking his pleasure. James is jealous, he realises, jealous of himself and the kiss he does not recall.

Francis makes a noise at the next feather-tickle of a kiss, a grunt that speaks of his impatience. He seizes James by the lapels of his coat and hauls him close, the movement calculated but forceful; and because James is not the man he once was, he falls easily into Francis, who stumbles backwards in surprise. The tilt of the deck and the trajectory of their stumble send them crashing into the wall of the cabin, trapping Francis between the wall and James.

As though struck with hitherto unknown certainty, the compass-needle of James’s desire shifts.

Francis opens his mouth and he nips at James is bottom lip. If his intention was to distract James from his feather-kisses he has succeeded, because Francis has just given James the first clue as to how much he’s allowed to want. He opens his mouth in turn and traces the shape of Francis is lips with his tongue. Francis’s breath hitches, fingers still tangled firmly in James’s lapels. It feels strange to James, that he should be so wanted, and by a man who is so used to guarding every emotion that is not ire, too: Francis doesn’t hold anything back now, unlike James, who feels there are layers and layers of himself he has to peel back before something resembling a genuine personality can emerge from under the tent-canvas of his disguises.

If he has done this before, he hopes he has savoured it.

Francis opens his mouth to James’s tongue and James finds the small gap between his front teeth—nothing like the gaping holes James will face in the coming months, this spot is pleasant to worry at, while the warmth of Francis’s mouth and the shock of cold where their wet lips are exposed to the air play tricks on James’s senses.

Kissing Francis is pleasant. His entire face is transformed under James’s attention—from a man scowling at his responsibilities until they fall in line into a younger, much more innocent man. When have they kissed before? James itches to know. In the absence of an answer that will satisfy him, he slides his hands down Francis’s sides and pulls him closer. The movement brings their bodies together, clad in too many layers to truly share warmth, but the comfort of Francis—his presence, the circumference of him, the weight of him—are a better balm on James’s soul. As James steps into his space, Francis’s shoulders relax further, and he lets himself fall against the wood behind him.

How long they stay there, James cannot say. All things that should matter to him—time, the possibility of discovery, footsteps passing in the corridor, the ever-present worry of their larger survival—recede like the gentle ebb of the low tide. He has set foot onto Ogygia, with Francis his Calypso.

Desire comes to him like the glimpse of a star on a cloudy night—he has not expected to see its like again in this land until he finds its evidence hardening in his trousers. For a moment he is ashamed, despite the fact that Francis is transformed under him—a man that might want him and allow James to want him back—but then he takes time to decipher the miniscule movements of Francis’s hips, the way he holds himself so carefully. James locks eyes with Francis. Francis pleads with him, ashamed in a way James will never fully understand.

“Please, James, I—I’m sorry. Will you indulge an old man?”

And James, who feels like he has stumbled across a gold mine in the desert—

“Good Christ, Francis. Anything.”

They made their way to James’s berth. James instructs Bridgens that they are not to be disturbed, and he sees in the crease of Bridgens’s brow that he would wish James to be more careful, but James cannot care. He’s afraid of forgetting again.

Jesus, have they done this before? Francis looks lost, but James imagines he will always look lost, unable to believe that someone should desire him, even when the evidence is laid bare before him. Experience has taught Francis that the people who love him will leave him, and he is nothing if not scientifically minded. Here is a hypothesis, confirmed. James will break the pattern, if he can keep his thoughts long enough to remember his vow.

They fall into each other will little grace, after stripping what outer layers they can bear to part with. Comfort and warmth are two ends of a spectrum, and James has often opted for warmth, but now he wants to be close to Francis. When they have wrapped themselves in blankets and around each other, James kisses Francis again. Francis shivers.

He’s not a man of many words, but he does speak to James, in his own way. The hand on James’s hip is a question, the way it shifts minutely, waiting to see if James will protest. James wouldn’t dream of it. He places his own hand on the side of Francis’s face, his thumb splayed across Francis’s cheekbone and the ends of his long fingers curving around towards Francis’s neck. Like this, James kisses Francis deeply, and feels warmer than he has felt in _years_.

Francis’s hand reaches its goal, finally, having contended with shirttails and the blankets they have piled on top of themselves. James gasps—the touch, expected though it was, shocks him deeply. He thought he remembered how this goes. He has evidently forgotten some details—the exquisite drag of skin on skin, the vulnerability of allowing someone else to touch him in this private place. It all comes out of him in one shuddering breath, gasping a desperate, drawn-out ‘ _ah’_ as Francis moves his hand steadily and without hurry. James’s legs feel numb, or perhaps he has simply lost all sensation beyond the heat of Francis’s hand on his prick.

A part of James still wants to draw his layers of self-deception around himself, to pretend he is not a man in need of human company, of a friend, but Francis has him bare before him. If he will use this to destroy James, James will have to allow it, for he certainly doesn’t have it in himself to stop Francis. When James finds his eyes, he sees no malice there. He knows what malice looks like on Francis Crozier, but it seems he has sweated it out with the whiskey.

James presses his forehead against Francis’s, closes his eyes against the onslaught of sensation. He bites his lip, hopes the tinge of pain will distract him, but it only prompts Francis to surge forward and nip at the offending lip himself. This leaves James embarrassingly desperate, rutting into Francis’s hand with an abandon he would feel ashamed for were he not past all shame. His release finds him shaking in this cocoon of warmth they have built, spilling his whine into Francis’s mouth where it will be a secret kept between the two of them, and then a secret only kept by Francis.

James’s hand is still shaking when he wraps it around Francis’s prick. He is seized by a sudden desire to see Francis undone, to see him come apart before James. There is that look of relief on Francis’s face again and James thinks that whatever burden Francis has lifted from his shoulders, James is taking at least twice that load from Francis now. He seems to relish giving control to James.

He screws his eyes shut in a pained expression when he comes, clinging to James’s arms tight enough to bruise. He shivers, opens his mouth. No sound comes out. James catches sight of a tear streaking down Francis’s face. He wants to wipe it away, but fears that calling attention to it might embarrass Francis more. They lie in silence, sweat soaking into blankets and clothing that will chill them before long.

James wishes they could stay like this forever—one perfect moment where he can imagine the sheets are softer, the air around them warmer and the world not one that would damn them for finding comfort in each other.

“I should go,” Francis says thickly. James wants to fall to his knees and beg him to stay. He fears losing the comfort and the memory of Francis if Francis leaves.

“Probably best,” James agrees. He watches Francis dress intently, attempting to commit him to memory once more. This time, he will not forget.

* * *

Memories come and go like summer breakup in the Arctic, sometimes taking whole chunks of the glacier of James’s mind with it. He knows he is forgetting things, but the holes in his memory are never in the places where he expects them to be. It’ll be the whereabouts of the itinerary he was meant to bring over to _Terror_ when he is focussed on what he will say during the command meeting; and it will be his lines for the command meeting when he has finally remembered the damn itinerary. It’ll be whether or not he’s had breakfast—whatever passes for breakfast in _Erebus’s_ wardroom these days—until Bridgens reminds him, and even then, James has half a mind to doubt him because he cannot _remember_.

Francis doesn’t say anything, but he watches James.

James feels like he’s speeding through a novel where he’s only reading every other page, or perhaps every third. He doesn’t forget their first kiss—if it was their first—but he knows he’s forgetting other things. Sometimes Francis will make a jape, and then look at James, and James will feel like he is stood on a stage and has forgotten his line. At first, it makes Francis draw back into himself and James has to coax him back out of his protective shell, the place where Francis withdraws when he feels like the world is about to let him down. When it happens again and again, Francis begins to frown at James over the table at the command meeting, and late at night when he thinks James isn’t looking.

Then he begins to recount things for James.

“Do you recall,” he says, unprompted, one night, as they’re sitting in the upside-down of _Terror’s_ great cabin, two candles lit between them, the coals having gone out an hour or two ago, “The pudding we had that first Christmas, on Beechey.”

James recalls the pudding, tells Francis so. Francis hums. “I thought it was dreadful. Only thing worse than grub is the cooks trying to approximate good food from home. Nothing makes homesickness fester like that.”

“Do you recall,” he says another time, as he is putting on his slops to head back to _Terror_ , “Le Vesconte’s face when you told the wardroom we’d be reducing the rations again.”

James does not recall that. He remembers quizzing Bridgens about his allotted portion one day, and the pained expression on Bridgens’s face as he explained to James the order he himself had given the night before. James had gone back to his cabin and buried his face in his hands for a long hour after that, close to tears but not finding the release.

“I do not,” he says.

Francis pauses in dressing. “His eyes went immediately to the biscuits on the table, as though they might disappear at the mere mention of rationing.”

James chuckles, a levity he does not feel. “Henry is very fond of his refreshments.”

And so it goes: James forgets, Francis recounts. He doesn’t have James’s skill for weaving a narrative, but he has an eye for detail, can describe in perfect minutiae the nervous twitch of Dr Goodsir’s mouth or the deftness of Lady Silence’s hands with the tools she carries. The memories don’t return to James, but sometimes the stories stay.

And they both pretend this is fine.

* * *

If there is any compassion in the world, James will forget this moment. He cannot wait for the purging waters of Lethe to wash it from his memory.

He stands in the great cabin on _Erebus_. The ship is quiet because she is empty—the crew has slowly vacated her over the last week, departing for Terror Camp. Only James remains, like a suitor who has missed the appropriate moment to say his goodbyes. Privately, he hoped this moment would never come, or that the tooth-gaps in his memory mean that he doesn’t have to live through the moment before forgetting it.

The great cabin is not as gilded as it was in 1845. Time, and the ice, and the necessity of their circumstances have whittled down the pomp. It no longer looks like a room where men are painted, but it does look like a room where men might eat and breathe and live. A home. That he is now leaving.

The memory of his last weeks here is spotty. This feels like a break in the clouds, the first clear moment in a long series of dark days, but they always feel that way when he is in them. The pain in his chest, the certainty of his own shortcomings, _that_ is familiar, and James knowns it will stick.

He sighs. The longer he delays, the more he gives himself to remember. Still, in one last turn about the room, he trails his fingers over every surface he can reach—the wooden cabinets, the table that has seen so many fateful decisions. Then, when he can no longer bear it, he turns to go. That last part is easy. James, like most sailors, is practised at leaving once he has set his mind to it.

The cold air hits him in a welcome shock when he climbs up the ladder. It’s a clear day, the sun hanging at half-mast in a sky so blue it looks fit to clothe the finest ladies. James is blinded by it—a symptom of the scurvy—so the hand on his arm startles him.

“Who goes there?”

He detests his helplessness in that moment. Fear threatens to knit his throat shut but then the man leans in, and a familiar brogue mutters: “It’s me, James. Be easy.”

James sways towards Francis. He can’t help it; isn’t sure if he ever could. The last months have convinced him that he was always meant to end up here, at Francis’s side, to bear witness to Francis managing the impossible. _He is you without shame_ , the Fates seem to tell him.

“Francis.” Up on deck, they are alone but not hidden, only half-concealed from the eyes of the men. James doesn’t bother hiding his relief. “I was rather under the impression I’d have to undertake this task alone.”

His sight returns in blots of colours. Francis squeezes his arm. James cannot yet see enough of his face to read it, but his presence here means something.

“I would not have either of us shoulder a burden alone.”

James swallows. He grasps Francis’s hand, briefly, and squeezes it before letting go. Then, they stand a respectable distance apart once more, as James watches _Erebus_ take her familiar shape around him. It is a birth, of sorts. In other ways, it resembles a funeral.

“I shall miss her,” James says, “I have not done right by her, but I shall miss her.”

“Don’t say that.” Francis shakes his head. He sounds so pained by James’s self-deprecation that James is almost inclined to believe him. “Out of all people, I’m glad it was you who commanded her last, James.”

James’s throat closes up. He manages a nod, stares out at the ice while blinking away the tears gathering behind his eyelids. Francis waits with him, quietly and patiently, as James pieces himself together by the railing. When he leaves _Erebus_ —last, as befits a captain—Francis is there to take his hand and help him down the last steps from the ramp onto the ice.

* * *

That night, the tent is the only thing he remembers.

He is lying on a cot raised up from the ground, in a tent beset by wind and ice and storms, his bones brittle like a burnt out log, a man without past or future. There is nothing he remembers beyond that, in the twilight hours that pass for nights now.

It is the voices of men outside that brings him back, and Bridgens come to remind him of some duty or another. With a start, James finds himself thrust back into this body, this time.

The next night, it is Francis.

They do not share a tent. It would be improper, even though James would like nothing more, afraid now of what the night may bring. He feels that Francis keeps him tethered to the man he used to be; he can keep time by the comings and goings of Francis. When they keep counsel after making camp, they share furtive kisses—upon James’s forehead, James’s brow, James’s cheek and hands; eventually his mouth. Francis handles him carefully. James bruises like a summer apple, a brief and glorious beauty that will have been devoured by the end of the season.

Oh, he is intimately familiar with dying. It is a performance, the last of his life.

Tonight, James barely remembers his name. He knows they’re on a journey, trying to get somewhere, and that he dreads the morning worse than he dreads the dissolving of his body. The morning brings pain, and unspeakably bright light. The morning puts James in the mind of Sisyphus and his boulder, but he cannot remember why.

“James, are you still awake?”

He knows he should respond. He can vaguely remember how to form words with his mouth, but it doesn’t seem worth the effort.

The quiet rustle of canvas in the wind. The certainty, the physicality of a presence next to him. A heavy, strong hand on his arm, a forehead pressed against his chest. A sob, barely contained.

“It shouldn’t have been you.”

James has the feeling he is being made a confessional. He does not mind.

“You’re young, James. You should have been able to weather this storm better than most of us. Didn’t you tell me you walked through all of Russia, just to deliver some bloody mail? Why would you choose to survive getting shot, just to die out here on the ice?”

There are stories behind those sentences. James wonders what kind of man would put some mail ahead of his own life. He’s not sure he would.

Another sob shakes the man above him.

“I think I know how to love well. I just don’t know how to love at the right time.”

* * *

Morning brings light, and clarity. He remembers bits and pieces of the night, of Francis’s visit to his tent. He puzzles over it while the strap of the harness is digging into his bird-bone chest. His illness plays with his perception of time, but it can’t be more than a day to Terror Camp at this point.

Sometimes James wishes he could trade places with one of the victims of the tuunbaq. It seems preferable to the slow death that has been inflicted upon him. Then he sees Francis smile at him and is glad that he is still here.

For Francis, he will keep going. For Francis, he will subject his brittle bones to the torture of hauling a sledge across the sea-ice, until someone calls a halt and they erect the tents again. Then he will go back to forgetting about himself again, until someone calls him back to being a person, come morning.

* * *

He thinks of fairgrounds when he sees Terror Camp. He doesn’t know why—hasn’t been to a fair in ages—but think of it he does. The push over the last ridge has exhausted him, but the pain has sharpened his mind instead of dulled it, and he sees his life as though from a bird’s perspective, all the choices that brought him here that still seem inevitable and right to him. A man, a storyteller. Someone who will die here.

In that moment, it seems right to him—he is someone who came from nothing, and who will disappear into the nothingness once more. Like a character in a book, the pages will close around him and cradle him safely.

They find themselves in Francis’s tent, the pretence of discussing strategy a well-worn deception on their tongue. James is not sure anyone still cares enough to wonder. Francis is exchanging damp socks for dry ones. James feels for bruises along the line of his ribs.

“Do you recall,” Francis begins, “When I first kissed you?”

His voice is private, a spark in his eyes betraying the fact that he is feeling rather mischievous. Reaching Terror Camp has brightened his spirits, as though finding it standing is only the first in a line of successes that will now come their way. James swallows.

Francis is in too good a mood for James to ruin it. But James cannot lie or deceive his way through this story. He looks at Francis who is rubbing at his cold feet, encouraging the blood to return to them, and still grinning rakishly. James loves him and it hurts worse than the strap digging into his chest while hauling. It is an empty kind of pain.

“I’m afraid I do not.”

The grin falls off Francis’s face like dripping ice melt. James shrugs—he is helpless to the traps that his memory sets him. Francis opens and closes his mouth once, twice, without deciding on anything particular to say.

“I’m dying, Francis,” James says. Speaking the words should feel like defeat and yet James feels stronger for having spoken them. It’s as though he’s reclaiming his own destiny—after all, he’s met death in China, in Russia, on several continents and in several forms. He should greet death like an old friend by now, though he’s not yet forty.

“Don’t say that, James.”

Francis is suddenly serious. James has watched him thusly a number of times now—when one of the lieutenants gives in to the fatalism of their situation, when the men grumble at another mile of hauling.

“It’s scurvy,” James says, unerringly.

“We’ll find game.” The way Francis says it, James can almost believe it. Would that their words had the power to shape the world to their will, they would have made a Northwest Passage through the ice.

“I find myself forgetting things. You’ve noticed. I’m bleeding from my scalp, and my teeth aren’t as sturdy as they used to be.”

His wounds have pricked and pained him the last couple of days. He’s heard that they reopen as the illness drags on and presses a hand to his side as though he can encourage his tissue to keep together.

“We’ll find game,” Francis says, more forcefully. He abandons his socks, reaches for James’s hands and cradles them safely between his own. “Don’t lose hope, James.”

James has hope, but he is also tired. Francis has the eyes of a man who will drag James to his salvation whether James wants it or not. He’s not sure whether to be grateful or terrified. If he survives, he will never be able to repay Francis. If there is no hope for them, then James’s suffering may stretch interminably across this island of pale, ever-shifting stone. He may resent Francis for it.

“Tell me about our first kiss,” James says, “Please.”

Francis holds his gaze for a moment longer, his brow furrowed with the pain of what Francis thinks is James’s resignation. He puts a gentle hand on James’s knee.

“You stayed late on _Terror_. We were putting together an itinerary for a meeting.” James can picture them, bent over stark white pages so close that their heads are nearly knocking together. “You were biting your lip. A terrible habit, the way you were chewing it raw. I couldn’t look away. I wanted to put these thoughts out of my head, but I couldn’t stop looking—and then you looked up and saw me.”

Francis’s smile is small and private. It is a smile James would almost describe as bashful if that weren’t a terribly ridiculous way to describe Francis Crozier. “You didn’t look away. You looked like—like you understood. I’d wondered, James, but I didn’t know—I asked myself _has he ever looked at a man that way?_ ”

James wishes for the thrill Francis recalls—the terrible moment on the precipice of reciprocated desire is not a place most people enjoy, but James has always found it a terribly exciting place to be. Perhaps that is because he has rarely been wrong about where his affections might be returned, nevertheless—there is a special kind of excitement in leaning in and tasting someone for the first time. James was robbed of it. He recaptures it now, with Francis’s help.

“Did you kiss me, then?”

“I was almost brave enough,” Francis says, shifting closer. The wooden pallet is hard under them, but there is something unbelievably soft about the moment. “But James, I’ve been rejected so often. I thought _this, this is a rejection you cannot bear, Francis_.”

Shifting closer still. Their legs tough, their hands in James’s lap are fully intertwined. Francis presses his forehead to James. One hand comes up to cradle James’s chin, his thumb tracing the line of James’s lips, pressing them open. Demanding entry.

“You opened your mouth. Just a little bit. And I kissed you.”

He punctuates it with a soft press of lips to James’s, his thumb soothing over James’s lip after Francis retreats. James closes his eyes and tries to picture it. He finds he has trouble replicating the image of the great cabin and so he leaves that aside, focusses instead on how Francis’s face might look full of unfulfilled hope, mixed with the fear of rejection.

“You were always braver than me,” James says quietly.

Tomorrow, the memory of this conversation may fade into the desolate landscape that has become his mind. If he is lucky, he will remember it—the good moments more so than the bad, the intimate moments with Francis most of all.

“You are not dying, James. I won’t let you,” Francis murmurs. He pats the pallet next to him, “Lie with me for a minute?”

They shift close together in the sleeping bag. This warmth is unparalleled in James’s experience—the warmth of another person, the warmth of Francis. He is glad he still has it.

“Do you recall,” Francis begins, and story after story follows. Some, James remembers. Others, he does not. Francis weaves the story of James Fitzjames effortlessly, as though at some point in the last months he has picked up the book where James has forgotten it. James finds himself glad that Francis is its keeper now.

* * *

Picture two men.

At the end of this story, picture two men. One of them is tall, in greying slops and with a hat askew on his thinning hair. He has holes in his memory and in his teeth, and holes in his body too. The other one is shorter and has not yet bled all colour. He is still more man than ghost; has pulled himself from the brink of his own death just in time to see everyone else around him dying.

They walk on the ashen ground into the grey horizon—a respectable distance apart now, still in view of the camp and their men. The shale crunches under their feet, low and repetitive. That distance between them will melt as they crest the first ridge, and then the second. They exist as one now.

They walk towards a destination, yes, but they also walk into the future. The future is yet unwritten. It can change. Both men know this, and they are not afraid.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this, consider leaving me a comment. I am also on tumblr as [veganthranduil](https://veganthranduil.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Fun fact: the concept title of this fic was '50 First Dates but make it scurvy'.


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